Server and System Status

Over the years we’ve noticed that a certain percentage of our clients are in the habit of forwarding all of their email to external free webmail services — e.g., Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. Why do we even notice this? Well, because these free services often delay your email, and so it queues on our server for anywhere between minutes and days. There are complicated reasons for this, but once you realise that you’re not the only one forwarding your email, you can see how these free webmail services might decide to limit the number of messages that they accept from our servers. This is especially noticeable when (not if) a few spams get through and (ironically) the receivers — the very NinerNet clients who have configured their email accounts here to forward to their free webmail provider — complain to the free webmail provider about the spam by clicking the convenient “this is spam” button. The free provider then responds by blocking or limiting mail from our server, making the reporting of the spam by the NinerNet client self-defeating!

Among other reasons, what people who do this are running into here is introducing multiple points of failure. If a message arrives on the NinerNet mail server, it’s made it! It has arrived where it was intended by the sender to be delivered. But now you’ve told our server to forward it somewhere else. It’s like telling a runner at the finish line that he has to do the same race again. And the runner might not make it the second time, just as your email might not make it into your Gmail account.

Right now there are a few dozen emails queued on our server waiting to be accepted by these free email services. Given that some of them have been queued for several days, most of them will likely bounce back to the senders within the next few hours. There is nothing unusual about this; we see it all the time, and it has little (if anything) to do with the mail server migration.

If webmail is your preferred way of accessing your email, we do (obviously) provide webmail on your own domain. (And non-Gmail webmail these days is way better than it used to be!) If you prefer the webmail offered by your free provider of choice, that’s fine, as long as you’re aware of the inherent risks of delayed and bounced email if you choose to forward everything.

If you’d like to discuss alternatives to forwarding your email, let us know and we can provide options to you or address any concerns you may have.

This blog provides information about the status of NinerNet Communications systems. Dates and times of posts to this blog are in the UTC time zone, and dates and times given for events are also in the UTC time zone, although conversions may be offered for some time zones common to our clients. Please use the World Time Server to ensure accurate conversion of dates and times to your own time zone.